- CIAT examines the climate change options for coffee and mongo in Haiti.
- Edward Carr reckons that from an aid donor’s perspective, adapting agriculture to climate change isn’t such a great idea.
- Neither has anything to say about this how-to guide to mushroom farming in Kenya.
Just to clarify, I was arguing more about how we think about adaptation, and who is doing the adapting. Obviously adaptations will have to occur in some systems, but I am concerned that development donors and implementers too often assume that all such adaptations will have to come from outside the communities and countries in which they are needed. And this is a problem related to how we see those in the Global South – a persistent narrative of poor and helpless that causes us to overlook their capabilities, and to overestimate our own…
Ed: It’s probable the genetic resource community have a greater respect for the abilities of traditional farmers than do donors. We see just what farmers have produced and its value. But it is not just donors at fault – there is an institutional problem. I once was losing a major battle with my bosses in a CGIAR institute over a paper I published on Kloppenburg’s `Seeds and Sovereignty’ on the key role of farmers in varietal management. Very fortunately for me the doyen of crop genetic resources, the late Jack Harlan, picked up on my paper. In Jack’s commentary on the volume he wrote: “The chapter by David Wood hit an especially responsive chord with me. The chapter is farmer oriented, and I have spent some of the best years of my life collecting in farmers’ fields and visiting with them. … The role of the “peasant” in all this has been underrated, and Wood has added a crucial perspective.”
Over several years of collecting dryland varieties I found that farmers in three continents were superb managers of what they had. They also had networks to get seed and information from beyond their own communities. But there is a decided limit to just what farmers can get their hands on: in effect a series of bottlenecks on what is available, on how to grow it, and how to use it for food. Smart donors can try to overcome these bottlenecks by giving farmers tools rather than imposed solutions.
A major under-used resource in climate-proofing agriculture is the vast information CGIAR institutes hold on regional trials, going back at least four decades all over the place, with local check varieties and climate and agronomic and plant pathology information. Another advantage of the CGIAR is its global reach and the ability to transfer varieties to where they can perform best – importantly, including under future climates (the databases are there). Finally – one of my hobby-horses – the value of crop introduction. More than 140 countries (out of about 200) have more than 50% if their crop introduced from other continents. I despair with donors wasting their funding and farmers’ abilities in promoting only `indigenous’ crops, full of co-evolved `indigenous’ pathologies that need complex and labour-intensive intercrops and the like to control. The CGIAR Centres were placed not just in regions of high genetic diversity but in regions of high pest and disease pressure: sort the pathology out in situ and then – with appropriate quarantine – get on with crop introduction. Farmers will do the rest.
Dave Woods: “get on with crop introduction”!
Not being a professional in this field, and not on anyone’s payroll – as you put it Dave – just here for the love of it – I’m afraid I may be missing something here, but isn’t it precisely modern mass crop introduction with its inevitable corollary of corporate promotion and monoculture, that is a big part of the homogenisation problem now?
As you yourself put it so well here, Dave:
“By being blind to the importance of crop introduction – and the almost certain corollary of massive exports – the paper misses a huge current threat to crop genetic diversity … the take-home message for me is that homogenization of diet [substantially caused, I claim, by the massive trade in introduced (alien) crops] is closely associated with putting `primitive’ farmers in centres of origin out of business. Bang go native crop genetic resources and all that continuing adaptation to climate change, pests, disease and whatever. Rice in Latin America could be the next success in crop introduction. Imagine what 150 million tonnes of rice exported to Asia each year (it’s happened with soybean) could do to Asian rice genetic resources. Will somebody please write a paper for PNAS quantifying this global catastrophe caused by the `crop introduction effect’ and associated exports?”
https://agro.biodiver.se/2014/03/globalized-diets-paper-globalizes/
Please could you clarify this apparent contradiction for a poor old lay-person like myself who doesn’t have the benefit of being a professional like most of you here. Sorry if you think I’m asking stupid questions, but please be gentle!
This is a bit off-topic here – which was about farmers’ capabilities. I think the problem is your “…modern mass crop introduction with its inevitable corollary of corporate promotion and monoculture”. First the `monoculture’. Nobody has done the survey but try this: crop introduction removes crops from co-evolved pests and diseases and therefore reduces the need for polyculture, that is, introduced crops can more readily be grown in monocultures that can native crops (but what about rice?). Next the corporate promotion. At its peak this was some time ago; United Fruit with banana and oil palm in tropical America; Brook Bond with tea in Kenya; the East India company with indigo in Bengal, Unilever with oil palm in Malaya. At least the `Uni-‘ bits looked after the genetic base – notably the La Lima banana germplasm collections in Honduras and the PORIM (evolved from Unilever) in Malaysia collecting wild oil palm relatives from Central America for future breeding.
The star example of modern mass introduction is certainly soybean in Brazil but this was not controlled by corporations (except the parastatal corporation EMBRAPA). We can’t blame Monsanto for exporting US seed technology: they are in the business of seed production and not farming, and certainly do not control the production and export of soybean in Brazil.
Perhaps another rising star is rice in Uruguay – again, not corporate.